


Barricade

by shelter



Series: Evenings without echoes [4]
Category: Claymore
Genre: Dystopia, F/F, One Shot, Post-Canon, Post-Series, apocalyptic, environmental catastrophe, human-warrior relations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 03:13:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10845315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shelter/pseuds/shelter
Summary: Post-series. Who do you save when the world ends?





	Barricade

**Barricade**

(Rated T for disturbing imagery)

  
_"And alone in my room as I am right now_  
_I can almost see calling your name_  
_And as memory fades into intention_  
_They seem to be one and the same"_  
\- _'Street Light Halos'_ , Jeffrey Foucault

.

. 

Deneve only knows she’s bleeding when she descends from the mountains.

It’s unseasonably warm, the air crisp and dry. The lonely sun ignites the snow around her, turning it into the purest white she’s ever seen. The stream she’s following down the mountains remains frozen, but icicles leak fluid. The entire landscape looks on the cusp of being washed away.

As she takes handfuls of snow, she leaves half-moons of red on the white. She touches her lips, finding them cracked and peeling so bad they sting when touched. She bites away the flakes of skin, savours the iron taste of blood on her tongue.

Soon the snow will melt and the streams will swell. For now, Deneve lets blood swirl in her mouth as she goes down the mountain to meet Helen.

* * *

Running a society is never easy. Towns and cities need to be fed. Villages need a good environment and a measure of security to supply the food and produce for large communities. Markets exist for the exchange of goods to occur, and the exchange must be based on a system of currency or barter.

Natural resources endow a place like the Island with its advantages. Arable land in the south produces all kinds of grain. The well-watered central plains of Toulouse support orchards, livestock and a sophisticated urban culture. The drier prairies of the west are the domain of pastoral tribes. The north, dominated by mountains and seasonal variations in temperature, only allows for pockets of subsistence.

Societies function by the strict rules of supply and demand of existing resources, and who controls what.

Then, there's the climate.

It begins slowly. An abnormally cold winter in the lowlands, followed by dry weather through the first months of spring. Crops don't germinate well, rains don't come as expected and cattle suffer.

"There's a shortage of grain in Toulouse." Deneve hears this at first caravanserai she stays in heading south. "Some bad weather in the plains."

As she heads towards the market town of Gonal to meet Helen, Deneve doesn't see anything out of the ordinary. Away from the piercing whiteness of the mountains, the plains are picturesque: low green hills with dollops of trees, a patchwork of gold grain and pale barley growing in the fields. The air feels heavy and swollen with moisture, saturated with a thousand scents.

At Gonal, Deneve seeks out the largest tavern, looks for the biggest gathering. Sure enough, she sees Helen presiding over the ruins of a drinking game, surrounded by an orbit of boisterous local men.

Deneve goes over and sits in an empty chair. The men lower their voices. They look like they've never seen two warriors in the same tavern before.

"Someone get a drink for my comrade-in-arms here!" Helen yells.

"Hello Helen," Deneve says.

"Awww… Nice of you to put on some paint on your face to see me."

"What?"

Deneve sees Helen takes the flagon in her hand and tap her lips with its rim. Then she understands.

"Helen, it's not face paint. It's blood."

"Still, you look pretty."

Before she can blink, Helen crosses the table and plants her lips on hers. Deneve tastes the flowery tang of alcohol, the fruity spice of something sweet.

The men stare, frozen. Helen lords over all as she finishes her drink, a shadow of a smile taking shape.

 

* * *

  
After hanging around Miria for so long, Deneve knows a thing or two about human society and governance: nothing is permanent in the human realm. Rulers come and go, systems fall, humans follow trade, tribe or warm weather for more favourable lands.

Climate affects the environment, which affects the land, and this in turn affects humans and their complicated social and economic arrangements – including the now-defunct Organisation’s orders to warriors. Deneve knows a problem with either one of these variables causes more problems along the sequence.

If there's something really wrong with the weather and the land, she expects some signs of human movement. Maybe ranchers moving their herds to the central plains, or more children being sent to churches in Rabona to be schooled.

She and Helen are in Hanel when family approaches them outside town. The father asks them to take their children to Rabona. The roads are full of bandits and murderers these days, and he can pay.

"Please take them with you," he says. "They'll be better off there."

Deneve looks at them as Helen and the father negotiate a fee. The two children are well-dressed, bright-eyed, but have long, stark cheekbones. The father's exposed neck is scorched by cross-hatched sunburn, and their mother's grey hair is falling, exposing the ruined landscape of her scalp.

"You have family in Rabona?" Helen asks.

"Yes, my lady."

"Sure we can make a short detour to the holy city, can we Deneve?"

Deneve kneels for a closer look at two children, a girl and her younger brother. "As long as they don't give us any trouble."

"They're good children," the mother says.

They give the family a moment to say their goodbyes. The mother fusses over their hair, and the children won't let go of her. When the time comes, she and Helen escort the children out of town. Deneve looks back, as the mother lingers at the square, only turning away when her husband pulls her to his shoulder. Towering over them, the statue of the twin goddesses turns blurry in summer heat.

 

* * *

  
Their travels that year are full of rumours and dreams of greener pastures elsewhere. Deneve doesn't know it yet, but she and Helen wander through a population on the brink of catastrophe.

In the taverns, there's talk of below-average yields, wells drying up. All through the south Deneve and Helen see men and boys idling by the roads, their harvests meagre or crops dying. Beggars greet them at the entrance of market towns. Helen isn't happy when the price of apples rises to twelve beras a pound.  
  
Many speak of full fields in west and central plains, where cattle are fat with grain and granaries are brimming with wheat. But when Deneve and Helen pass through these towns, the people there say the same thing about the east. Rumour reinforces rumour, and Deneve isn't sure who's true or where the truth comes in.

Through it all, they endure a parched summer. By day, sunshine blasts the landscape into dust and wavy lines of heat. By night, the heat sits on their shoulders, wafting through buildings and trees like a persistent phantom.

"The land's drying up," Deneve says.

"Awww... come on. It's just some freak weather," goes Helen.

Deneve hopes she's right.

 

* * *

  
They leave the children in the company of a relative at Rabona's east gate. As Helen points out the city's landmarks, Deneve talks to their guardian.

"How's things in the city?" she asks.

"As usual. It's been a warm summer," he glances at the children. "They'll be safe here."

"I don't doubt it."

He leans in and asks her in a quieter voice, "Are things bad in the provinces? Are the rumours true?"

Deneve thinks of the dusty roads, and glimpses of children playing in the ash of burnt fields. She looks at the man and shrugs.

They leave the city because neither of them have any affection for Rabona. Again, Deneve notices beggars at the gates as human traffic heads to the city.

"How much did those children's parents give us?" she asks Helen.

"Three hundred beras."

"That's a lot of money."

Helen runs her fingers through the gold coins in their money bag.

"I could get used to this," she says.

Deneve watches her, and says, "We're not going back to Hanel."

 

* * *

  
Summer gives way to autumn. The world cools, rags of clouds begin to obscure the sun. Leaves desert their places on trees. And Deneve and Helen travel north to Bacali.

Beyond Bacali lie the abandoned towns of Dabi and Pieta. It's the furthest north Helen will go, and the furthest south Deneve's willing to spend winter. In the windswept town square, they pause and look around before they part. Deneve knows Helen's waiting for her to speak first. It's a ritual they perform every autumn, each wanting the other to stay but not daring enough to say it out loud.

"Why do we do this?" Deneve says.

"Ha! I win this year."

"Helen -"

"Don't act so moody. It's just several months."

Helen comes close, swipes her lips across Deneve's in a parting kiss. Unlike earlier in the season, Deneve tastes an earthy, heavy aftertaste in her lips.

She forces a smile. Then Helen turns and heads to the nearest tavern. Deneve knows she's been dismissed.

 

* * *

  
The winter months are unusually mild and the snowfall less intense. So Deneve makes a bid for the north coast of Alphonse. It takes her the better part of the season to reach the volcanoes that fence off the northernmost reaches like fiery sentries.

She makes it as far as a smoky black mountain topped with a faint glow of fire. Its frequent eruptions make it seem as if the entire earth is breathing. Near the summit, ash mixes with the ever-present snowstorms, and the sky’s always veined with lightning. There, through the icy gale, she can make out the distant sea. Everything before her is uncharted, the loneliest place in the world.

Deneve spends a day on the mountain. The cold forces her to think about how she and Helen reached their current state of summer flings and winter exile. Too much familiarity in too much company, she thinks, was their problem. But is this forced separation their best answer to that?

She treks back south, over the high roads, through the mountain passes now accessible. There’s nothing but rock and eroded valleys. Somehow, she finds more peace in the desolate landscape than in the lush, humid south.

Before she leaves volcano country, she sights something improbable: a house, half-buried by snow, crouched in a hanging valley on an adjacent mountain. She remembers the place, hoping to investigate the valley soon.

By the time she returns to the mountains around Dabi and Pieta, where she and the other Ghosts spent seven years in hiding, the air’s warm with the impending arrival of spring.

 

* * *

  
Fifteen clicks down the road from the ruins of Pieta she meets a caravan. After Pieta, she’s never seen humans this far north.

They stop along the road. She knows her presence disturbs them. So she lays both her swords on the ground and waits. After a while, two men walk out. One wears long flowing white robes; the other is a bald stocky soldier with a spear.

“We come in peace,” the soldier says.

Deneve nods. The robed man, however, keeps babbling.

“I saw four horsemen in the south!” he shouts at the mountains. “Pestilence, famine, war and death!”

Deneve takes the warrior aside.

“What are you doing so far north?” she asks. She already knows the answer.

“There’s troubles in the south,” the soldier says. “We’re fleeing to safe haven with our families.”

“How many of you?”

“About twenty families, with our servants and cattle.”

“You’re refugees, aren’t you?”

“The four horsemen stalk the plains! Where there’s nothing but suffering!” the robed man says.

Deneve doesn’t want to hold them up. She gives them directions to Pieta and Dabi, warns them of yoma in the mountains. As the caravan passes, she sees the malnourished children, shallow-cheeked mothers and skinny goats.

“Nothing but suffering!” the robed man tells her.

 

* * *

  
“I think this is only going to get worse.”

Deneve and Helen travel east this time around, skirting the ruins of Staff and the desert wastelands of the interior. Scathing winds form whirlpools of sand and dirt along the roads. The largest market town is full of displaced farmers. A thick haze hangs in the air from wildfires raging in the hills.

“You’re talking about this weather?” asks Helen.

“I’m talking about all this. The drought, the famine and whatever comes next.”

They’re resting in the shade on the outskirts of a village. Deneve doesn’t want to impose on them. From afar, she observes children biting on dry twigs and grinding dead leaves into brackish water to drink.

“The island’s dying.”

“Great,” says Helen, stretching out against a trunk. “So we are waiting for the world to end.”

Deneve’s been thinking for a while. She looks at the cloud-less sky, imagining scenarios to outrun and outsmart what’s coming next.

“You have a plan, don’t you?”

Deneve tells her. As she expects, Helen’s silent for a while. Eventually she yawns, gets up.

“Good plan,” she says. “Let’s do it.”

“That was fast.”

“Well, I can’t live in a world where apples are thirty beras a pound anyway.”

 

* * *

  
They head north early. They stop at Bacali to pick up some supplies, skip the re-inhabited towns of Dabi and Pieta and head into the mountains. They cross the valley they’ve named Eva’s Pass and keep climbing.

Deneve only has her memory to guide them. Still, in the summer, the passes are open and the mountains are a rush of colours. They traverse the slopes until the green arc of the tree line falls away and the ground turns into grey swell of scree and rock. On the summer solstice, they sight the lofty, puffing mountains.

“I wouldn’t mind if the north was like this all year,” Helen says.

When they reach the point where Deneve saw the house, it takes them a day to cross the valley, another to scale the slopes to reach the front door. Up close, the isolated house is ribboned with weeds, half-submerged by dirt. Man-made stairs hewn into rock lead further up the rock. From the house, Deneve can see right low-lying clouds racing across the valley. She takes in the commanding view as Helen sidles up to her.

“Nice.”

Deneve nods, “Let’s get to work.”

 

* * *

  
To survive like they did under Miria, Deneve knows they need temperature control, water supplies and a shelter. She finds it ironic that she’s trying to fulfil these basic needs in the far north, while others struggle with them in the south.

They weather-proof the house, fix the walls and doors. They haul wood from trees they’ve cut down, wrap leather skins they bought from Bacali on the roof for insulation. They take two days to find a water source.

“Helen, you sure this is going to work?”

“Stand back and let me work my magic!”

She stands aside, watches. Deneve can almost feel the strain in her own arm as Helen contorts hers into a twisted taut worm. Helen’s face is slipping into focused agony, and a blood vessel surfaces like a snake beneath her temple. Even in the cold, Helen’s sweating. Deneve sees the trail it leaves down Helen’s sideburns. She wants to – almost – extends her tongue to save that drop before it leaves Helen’s skin.

Helen jerks the point of her sword into rock. She shudders and the worm unwinds. Deneve’s probably seen this a hundred times already, but it still amazes her: yoki-powered limbs unclenching, the sword cutting into sheer rock, Helen’s maniac grin.

A rooster tail of dirt streams from the rock. Soon, Deneve sees it’s mud, and finally a gurgling fountain of water. Helen celebrates by scooping a handful and dumping it on her. Deneve responds by shoving her into the spray. With Helen’s arm still recovering from its Drillsword, she’s no match for Deneve, and soon Deneve has her face down on the earth.

“Come on… Ow! I surrender!”

“You’re always picking fights you can’t win,” Deneve says.

“And you always like being on top, don’t you?” Helen grins.

By the time Deneve’s answered these provocations, she’s straddling Helen. And her fingers dive down and dig deep through mud and water to find where Helen’s body is the warmest.

 

* * *

  
Summer becomes a frenzy of weather extremes. The days are so warm that snowmelt fills the streams, flooding the lower reaches of the valley with debris and mud. Bouts of rain trigger landslides on the slopes nearby. In the evenings it is still cold enough for pooled water to freeze over. Deneve wonders how bad things are further south.  
But as the seasons change, Deneve knows it’s not the south she has to worry about.

She wakes one morning to a cold bed. Sunshine blooms in the empty house. She gets up and finds Helen outside, all ready to leave.

“It’s time,” Helen says.

“Helen –”

“Don’t, Deneve.”

“You don’t know what’s going on in the south,” Deneve says. “It could be complete chaos down there.”

Helen sighs. “You know how this works.”

“Why?” Deneve’s voice breaks. She never imagines herself saying this. “Stay with me.”

Helen places a hand on Deneve’s cheek and drops in low for a kiss. She says, “Don’t make this harder than it already is.”

Then, she’s gone. Deneve watches until the flagging cloak she wears disappears in the turns of the valley.

 

* * *

 

The long arm of fall drags its shadow across the valley. Dense fog overtakes the mountains. Wind-chased clouds swirl above the peaks.

Deneve sees and knows: the winter will be savage. She needs to collect water, strips the bare slopes of shrubs for firewood and hoard the mouldy apples that Helen left behind. In the rebuilt fireplace, she starts a fire. She feeds it fuel each night. And when winter comes, she sits with her back to the wall, drapes herself in a blanket and closes her eyes.  
This was how it was like during those seven years in the north with Miria, waiting for the bad to pass.

Outside, storms soak the mountains. Snowfall make day seem like night. Winds batter the house. The windows freeze. The fire diminishes until it becomes one finger of flame.

At one point, an avalanche turns everything into darkness.

It gets colder and colder until her breath catches in her throat.

Inside, she dreams of walking through a flurry of snow, reaching the other side only to find the land dry and dead. She dreams of a dead land, skeleton humans wandering the towns. The earth is a sea of sand and everything is grey. She dreams of the cold north sea, like the surface of a dark glass.

The house structure groans under the weight of all that snow. She thinks: this is what she and Helen are made of. A shelter for something warm in a world going to hell, a place of repose – a locked-in hollow of defiance against all odds –

The earth outside Hanel. The beach at Mucha. Tea with Miria in Rabona. Helen.

When the screaming winds go silent, she opens her eyes to a new world.

 

* * *

  
It takes her almost a day to dig herself out. With the sun still blocked by clouds, she can’t tell how long she’s been snowed in. She clears the snow from the hut, retrieves her Claymore and starts south, following the smallest trace of Helen’s yoki.

The valleys are barricaded by snowfall. The path through the mountains has been wiped clean by avalanches and scree. She ploughs through canyons and along mountain ledges, with nothing but the rise and fall of the sun to guide her. Deneve walks, with nothing but Helen’s old apples to sustain her, until the mountains look familiar.

There’s an abandoned caravan by the side of the mountain road. She doesn’t need to stop to see its frozen occupants, half-buried by snow. The pass to Dabi and Pieta is blocked, and she tries not to think of the new inhabitants there, cut off from the world.

Further south, the weather doesn’t let up. Snowfall gives way to watery sleet, and the snow turns the roads to mush. When she finally reaches Gonal, she senses something’s wrong. Worse than that nagging feeling is the absence of Helen’s yoki.

There are men warming themselves by a fire outside the tavern where she met Helen two seasons ago. Behind them, the tavern sits black and quiet, as if gutted by fire.  
It was like this when Miria brought them out of hiding. After so long in solitude, human company is both unfamiliar and unexpected. When one raises her eyes to her, Deneve looks away.

“There’s no one here, O warrior,” one of them says. “We sent our families south. Abandoned the town.”

“The fields also,” goes another.

“The storms. And the frost. And now floods,” says the first.

Another looks to her and says, “We stayed to protect our homes from looters. Will you help us?”

Deneve sees the quiet town and the men before her. She drops to her haunches, stares up at their piss-yellow eyes and dirt-caked beards.

Her voice is hoarse, her words alien to her ears, sharpened by her own hardship: “Go south,” she says. “If you stay here, all of you will die.”

 

* * *

  
Humanity is a construct, Deneve knows. Just like how compassion is a gift and order is like magic. Humanity doesn’t come from human society, neither is it fostered by it. Still, she knows compassion and order sometimes go hand in hand. With the implosion of everything south of the mountains, Deneve doesn’t expect anything near humanity.  
She travels south, making detours around big towns along the road. She tries to avoid human company. If famers from Gonal were desperate enough to ask a yoma-touched like her for help, the world must be heading into madness.

She’s never seen the land so grey. Dead grass, collapsed farmhouses, waterlogged and rotting fields. Looming over the landscape, dark clouds churn in restless sky.

After three days’ journey from Gonal, Deneve reaches a bridge crossing, leading south into Rabona. The roads are crowded with families and caravans camping, backed up several kilometres from the bridge. The sight and stench of so many people in a place repulses her for a moment. Men in white robes move among them, unsettling her even more. She observes a squadron of soldiers holding back this drab parade of the dispossessed.

When she muscles her way to front of the column, the soldiers stop here.

“Hold it, sister,” they say. “No one comes through this bridge.”

“What are the soldiers of Rabona doing so far north?”

“Keeping our motherlands safe.”

“From what?”

The soldiers look at her. Then, one gestures to the refugees. Another points at the land around him. Some look down. Another clutches his dirty scabbard. She notices their thin legs, and lack of helmets.

“We have orders,” they say.

“Tell me,” she says. “Did another warrior like me pass this way?”

They shrug. Then one who looks to be their leader says, hushed. “None. But there are warriors lost among the people near Rabona, living like the poor.”

“What do you mean by lost?”

“Some people say the end of the world has an effect on people. Brings out the worst in them. Makes them mad with abandon.”

Deneve’s head swims. Conversation over, the leader pulls back and says aloud, “The only people who pass through the bridge are in coffins.”

 

* * *

  
She fords the river at night, downstream from the bridge. The shock of cold water numbs her feet, and the strong current catches her. For several moments, she can’t feel the bottom.

The river throws her into the deepest channel. In the dark, she sees stars come and go, her head barely breaking water. Adrift, she pictures Helen, latches onto the memory of Helen’s yoki. She floats further downstream until, exhausted from treading water, she closes her eyes.

When she wakes, she’s washed up on a riverbank strewn with the skeletons of horses. There’s smoke filling her nose, mixed with the syrupy sweet scent of something putrefying. Cold and wet, she crawls up the bluffs and sees a ruined town. Broken-down buildings, muddy streets. Only that it’s filled with people.

A prick in her consciousness sends her towards it. In the drab spring thaw, the town can pass off as a derelict Musha or a Hanel down on hard times. The trees have been stripped of leaves. An apocalypse of dirt lies heaped at the entrance. Where there should be town guards, beggars sit unclothed, unmoving in piles lining the streets. Children with bloated stomachs lie in puddles black with flies. Men in white robes lay hands on others with white blooms of maggots in their flesh.

The stench is terrible, but something drives Deneve on. She leaves wet, sopping steps and turns into the main street. A shabby tavern catches her eye.

Its roof is missing. But the place is still full of people. Outside, women offer their services. One asks Deneve if she’s interested in what she sees. Before Deneve can answer, another says she will be hers for half the price. Deneve pushes past them, the tapping in her mind more acute, the sense of foreboding deeper than ever.

Everything inside is emblematic of the chaos the world has descended into. Roof open to the elements, squatters everywhere, human waste lining the walls. More. Men and women sell others and are sold. More men in white robes, armed and veiled, leer at her, the only other person with a sword. And in the centre of it all, stands Helen.

At first she can’t understand what’s going on. Helen stands on a pedestal made of tables in rags that Deneve thinks are hardly modest. Leaning on her Claymore, she receives kisses, shouts at men and drinks anything she’s offered. Deneve isn’t sure what’s wrong. All she picks out is that Helen is either drunk or drugged.

So she approaches Helen. She has to arm-twist a man trying to stop her.

“Helen?” she says.

“Aww…look at this cutie,” Helen says. She touches Deneve’s hair, pokes her cheeks, even paws at her chest. “She’ll make good coin.”

At this moment, Deneve realises it, and remembers the words of the soldiers by the bridge. She looks at Helen again, and at the decay around her, the world gone mad on its last legs.

“Helen? It’s me, Deneve.”

“What a good name for a whore.”

Before she can control herself, Deneve elbows Helen in the stomach and rains a knockout blow with her palm into her temple. The entire tavern comes to life. Many scatter, but some of the white robed men choose to fight.

When Deneve draws her Claymore, it dawns on her she’s never before taken a life for the one she loves. The first strike nicks at her vision, and she descends into battle fury.

 

* * *

  
She carries Helen over the choppy rivers of the south, past destroyed bridges and matchstick forests. She carries her along paths so muddy they sink with every step forward. The world burns down all around them, dissolving into legions of refugees walking to death or militias fighting for scraps, their remains ghosted away by the wind.  
She carries Helen up into Alphonse and into the mountains. Baccali is a cemetery. Dabi and Pieta are buried under debris. The mountains are quiet, wind hollowing out their empty spaces.

All through their journey Deneve thinks of her fellow warriors, if they’re also trying to survive.

But she knows that nothing’s more important than the burden on her back. And the house that is waiting.

She crosses the melting glaciers. She skips rockfalls under the watchful eye of mountains. A passing rainstorm plunges the valley into fog. She doesn’t see the house until she’s halfway across the valley.

And then it’s just the door, the house, stripping all her tattered and muddy clothes, and cleaning the filth and blood from both bodies. And then it’s just the bed, the blankets and Helen.

 

* * *

  
“What happened?” Helen asks.

Deneve wakes to the purplish haze of early morning light in their house. She feels the warmth of Helen’s body, Helen’s arms a ring around her torso. She smells the citrusy sweaty scent of Helen’s hair: a gold fan across the blanket. She reaches out to grab a strand, inhales it deeply.

Her eyes adjust to the home, the only bulwark against the collapsing world outside. A home she built together with Helen, whose face fills it like a dream.

“Deneve?”

They will wait for the bad to pass.

“Nothing,” she says. “Go to sleep.”

_END_

**Author's Note:**

> If you've reached this point, thank you for reading!
> 
> This fic was supposed to be titled "The Ballad of Deneve and Helen."
> 
> I have never written a story like this before (combining a staple of the spec fic genre with Claymore), and pardon the rough edges. Originally meant to tie-in with 'Though the Heavens Fall', the fic evolved into a monster of its own, and this version up here has been cut to clarity by about 1,000 words. 
> 
> Following NumberA's feedback in 2016, I have been going through all my stories (including a Raftela one that I completed last year), and have been revising them to cut down on gratuitous violence or unnecessary graphic descriptions. Although the year is almost halfway through, I resolve to be better in writing by being more character-focused, subtler in storytelling and nuanced in my portrayal of canon. 
> 
> While asking readers if this story is believable doesn't apply here, I would like to know two questions (towards which you can direct your critique, if needed):
> 
> _a) What is your opinion on the arrangements of Deneve and Helen's relationship as portrayed in the story?_  
>  _b) What do you make of Deneve's solution to the end of the world?_


End file.
